This study examined correlations between moral value judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), and participant scores on the Short-D3 “Dark Triad” Personality Inventory – a measure of three related “dark and socially destructive” personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. 567 participants (302 male, 257 female, 2 transgendered; median age 28) were recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk and Yale Experiment Month web advertisements. Different responses to MIS items were initially hypothesized to be “conservative” or “liberal” in line with (...) traditional public divides. Our demographic data confirmed all of these hypothesized categorizations. We then tested two broad, exploratory hypotheses: (H1) the hypothesis that there would be “many” significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad, and (H2) the hypothesis that there would be no significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Machiavellianism or Psychopathy, but “some” significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Narcissism. Because our hypotheses were exploratory and we ran a large number of statistical tests (62 total), we utilized a Bonferroni Correction to set a very high threshold for significance (p=.0008). Our results broadly supported our two hypotheses. We found eleven significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad – all at significance level of p<.00001 – and no significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and the Dark Triad. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments. (shrink)

In its descriptive sense ethical language allows one to make assertions, which like other assertions may be true or not. “One should not torture,” descriptively, makes an assertion about torture - that it is an act that one should not do. While the peculiar force of ethical language comes from its overloading of different types of uses - descriptive, imperative, and emotive -, our concern here will be with the descriptive. Many of our assertions will focus on the English word (...) ʻshould,ʼ although mutatis mutandi they hold as well for other ethical terms, such as ʻjust.ʼ.. (shrink)

I argue, contra Dreier, Blackburn, and others, that there are no morally neutral metaethical positions. Every metaethical position commits you to the denial of some moral statement. So, for example, the metaethical position that there are no moral properties commits you to the denial of the (quite plausible) moral conjunction of 1) it is right to interfere violently when someone is wrongly causing massive suffering and 2) it is wrong to interfere violently when only non-moral properties are at stake. The (...) argument generalizes to all metaethical positions. (shrink)

Intuitions are widely assumed to play an important evidential role in ethical inquiry. In this paper I critically discuss a recently influential claim that the epistemological credentials of ethical intuitions are undermined by their causal pedigree and functional role. I argue that this claim is exaggerated. In the course of doing so I argue that the challenge to ethical intuitions embodied in this claim should be understood not only as a narrowly epistemological challenge, but also as a substantially ethical one. (...) I argue that this fact illuminates the epistemology of ethical intuitions. (shrink)

tell me . Users are also encouraged to draw my attention to omissions. Note however that the bibliography is selective and I do not include everything suggested. But if you think a book or paper is good and don't find it here do tell me.

The Continuum Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Fourteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, the exciting new directions (...) the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution, and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including important technical terms in ethics, a historical chronology, an extensive overview of contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical ethics. (shrink)

The Euthyphro Dilemma is named after a particular exchange between Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato‟s dialogue Euthyphro. In a famous passage, Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Plato 1981: 10a), and proceeds to advance arguments which clearly favor the first of these two options (see PLATO). The primary interest in the Euthyphro Dilemma over the years, however, has primarily concerned the relationship between (...) God and morality in the monotheistic religious tradition, where God is taken to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, having created the universe initially and still actively involved in it today. But as we will see at the end of this entry, there has also been a recent surge of interest in a version of the Dilemma which applies to so-called response-dependent accounts of normative properties in meta-ethics. (shrink)

The study of morality continues to flourish in contemporary philosophy. As the chapters of this Companion illustrate, new and exciting work is being done on a wide range of topics from the objectivity of morality to the relationship between morality and religious, biological, and feminist concerns. Along with this vast amount of work has come a proliferation of technical terminology and competing positions. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the terrain in contemporary ethics.

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend (...) to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions. (shrink)